Modern businesses and industries relay heavily on digital media as primary means of communication and documentation. Digital media can be easily copied and distributed (e.g., via e-mail and peer-to-peer networks), and therefore the hazards of business espionage and data leakage are of major concern: Companies are at daily risk of losing sensitive internal documents, leading to substantial financial losses. Banking, legal, medical, government, and manufacturing companies have much to lose if sensitive internal documents are leaked. The safe distribution of internal documents, memos, blueprints, payroll records, patient medical information, banking and financial transactions etc, is becoming more complex to ensure. In fact, as a consequence of such leaks, the United States federal government was prompted to intervene and has mandated that companies should protect sensitive information such as financial and patient medical records. From the companies and businesses standpoint, potential risks include financial losses, fiduciary risks, legal problems, competitive intelligence, public relations problems, loss of clients and privacy liability. There is therefore a great interest in methods that may mitigate digital espionage in particular and confidential data leakage in general.
In addition, unauthorized and/or illegal copying and distribution of multimedia content, such as audio and video, has become highly prevalent in recent years, especially via the Internet. Such unauthorized copying and distribution is an infringement of copyright protection laws and cause financial damage to the rightful owners of the content. It is therefore of great interest to find methods that may stop or at least reduce illegal copying and/or distribution of multimedia files without interfering with legitimate activities.
Most current computer networks security solutions focus mainly on preventing outside penetration into the organization and do not provide an adequate solution to the transfer of sensitive documents originating from within the company. These solutions are usually based on Firewall or Antivirus models that do not stop negligent or malicious email, Web-based mail or FTP file transfers.
Methods and systems for preventing the sending (i.e. outgoing transport) of digital content exist. Some methods assign a digital signature to each file and do not permit sending of a signed document without adequate authorization. However, such methods can easily be circumvented by transforming the content to another format or otherwise changing the content without altering the actual information content. Other known methods use file extension, file size and key word filtering: for example, a filter is set which searches for a predetermined word such as “finance” and prevents any document containing the predetermined word from being sent. Such a filter may be either too selective or too permissive, since the decision is based on scarce information.
Methods for digital rights management (DRM) and digital copyright protection exist. Some methods are designed to control and monitor digital copying of the content. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,115,533 describes authentication of an information signal prior to mass duplication of the signal by analyzing the signal to detect the presence or absence of a security signal therein, inserting a security signal into the information signal, and recording the modified signal only if no security signal was detected. U.S. Pat. No. 6,167,136 describes a method for securely storing analog or digital data on a data storage medium: an analog information signal is then combined with a noise signal. The composite noise and information signal is encrypted with a key, which is derived from the noise signal. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,006,332 a system is provided for controlling access to digitized data. In the system, an insecure client is provided with a launch pad program which is capable of communicating with a secure Rights Management server. The launch pad program provides an indicator to a public browser, used by the unsecured client, which acknowledges when a rights management controlled object is detected. While these methods make illegal copying difficult, it is commonly believed that none of the existing methods is effective against a determined and competent opponent. Furthermore, once a certain protection method is cracked, the cracking tools and methods become available to a large community thereby rendering the protection method ineffective.
Methods for usage rights enforcement of digital media in file sharing systems are also known. Some methods are designed to provide protection against centralized file sharing systems, where searching for the desired file is performed using an index that is located in a central server. e.g., the “NAPSTER” file sharing system. In this case, software on the central server can monitor the indexed file and prohibit illegal usage. Such methods require cooperation from the server operator. However, copyright protection against decentralized, “peer to peer” files sharing networks e.g., “Gnutella” and “FreeNet” and document distribution networks e.g. “Internet Newsgroups”, as well as protection against centralized file sharing networks without the cooperation of the server operator, are much harder, and these problems are not addressed by current methods.
Other methods attempt to use bandwidth management tools in order to reduce the available bandwidth for multimedia transport in places where such transport is suspected of carrying a large proportion of illegal content. The inspection is performed, in general, in the “application layer”. However, such methods are in general not selective enough, that is to say they do not distinguish effectively between legal and illegal (or unauthorized) content, and thus may interfere with legitimate data traffic.
It is foreseeable that as the availability of disk space and bandwidth for data communication increases, unauthorized and illegal distribution of digital content may increase and become more prevalent unless effective counter-measures are taken.